2009-06-29

hypothesis confirmation

Phil Marshall showed up in Heidelberg today; he and Kasper Schmidt (MPIA) and I had lunch and discussed (among other things) the confirmation and rejection of hypotheses, which rarely—in the real world—goes according to either the Bayesian or the frequentist methodology. For example, the WMAP-1 paper was taken to be an awesome confirmation of the standard CDM model (and it was!) even though it had a bad chi-squared value (so frequentists were wrong to be excited) and it wasn't being competed against any serious alternative model (so Bayesians have nothing to say at all). I think this all comes down to message length, but I certainly haven't worked it all out yet.